Forum Moderators: buckworks
Are you trying to:
1. Raise money?
2. Get empoloyees on board
3. Earn a living?
4. Make some side dollars?
5. Impress your friends with a flashy site?
Whats are you goals and how will writing a business help you get closer to them?
I'm not sure I read your post correctly so I'll take the risk and explain myself. It makes absolutely no sense to begin any business without a plan. You don't necessarily need to write a formal business plan - full explanations and such that you'd feel comfortable taking to a bank for $$ - but you should always take the time to write up the plan. Otherwise, you're likely to just be throwing your money/time away.
If you can afford to build an ecomm site and toss in a few drop-ship vendors and see what it produces then great. You're taking a crap shot. And maybe that industry will pay out well but what if you found an industry with half the competition and twice the profit margin? Wouldn't you rather sell their products? The point being that a bit of research can go a long way toward preventing you from wasting your time and money. Laying out the plan includes that upfront research as well as the milestones for achieving the goal.
Learn to love the compass and forget the clock.
Hab
A mind map is just a big tree root thing with a central concept and ideas branching out
I made my business plan using a mindmap and it suddenly organised itself into 7 categories:
Suppliers
Customers
Products
Marketing
Order
Delivery
Bank
branch out what you plan to do from these and you're half way on to a winner!
Small Business Administration [sba.gov]
So does a big national chain of office type stuff have a small business section with business plan info, but I'll not even give a clue - they're not hard to find, just open the Sunday newspaper ads.
Another route if you're a registered user of MS Office software is that they may have free business or marketing plan templates available for download; they do for a number of other types of business documents and some are very good.
Some of what's in business plans may not apply to some sites, but another thing is that there are also marketing plans. Some of that may be included in a business plan, but there are some that say it's an independent endeavor separate from the biz plan and serves a different purpose.
